American Educational Research Journal

August 2019, Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 1495–1523

DOI: 10.3102/0002831218817737
Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Ó 2019 AERA. http://aerj.aera.net

Starting Early: The Benefits of Attending Early

Childhood Education Programs at Age 3
Arya Ansari
Robert C. Pianta
Jessica V. Whittaker
Virginia E. Vitiello
Erik A. Ruzek
University of Virginia

This investigation considered the short-term benefits of early childhood edu-

cation participation at age 3 for 1,213 children from low-income families
living in a large and linguistically diverse county. Although no benefits
emerged for executive functioning, children who participated in formal
early childhood programs at the age of 3 entered prekindergarten the

ARYA ANSARI, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Advanced
Study for Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia, 405 Emmet Street
South, Charlottesville, VA 22904; e-mail: aa2zz@virginia.edu. His research focuses
on understanding how contextual factors influence the early learning and develop-
ment of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, with the aim of informing poli-
cies and intervention programs that can benefit such children.
ROBERT C. PIANTA, PhD, is Dean of the Curry School of Education and Human
Development and the Novartis U.S. Foundation Professor of Education at the
University of Virginia. His research and policy interests focus on the measurement
and improvement of teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom.
JESSICA V. WHITTAKER, PhD, is an assistant research professor at the Center for Advanced
Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia. Her research is focused
on examining the association between early teacher-child interactions and children’s
academic and social-emotional outcomes, particularly for those from underserved
and underrepresented groups.
VIRGINIA E. VITIELLO, PhD, is a research assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s
Curry School of Education and Human Development. She is a developmental psy-
chologist with an interest in applied research in child care and school-based settings.
Her research focuses on how classroom settings shape young children’s engagement
and learning.
ERIK A. RUZEK, PhD, is a research assistant professor at the Center for Advanced Study
of Teaching and Learning, University of Virginia. His research illuminates the class-
room processes that promote student engagement, motivation, and learning, with
a special interest in understanding the predictors and consequences of students’ per-
ceived experiences in classrooms.
Ansari et al.
following year demonstrating stronger academic skills and less optimal
social behavior than their peers with no earlier educational experience.
However, these academic benefits were short-lived and did not persist
through the end of prekindergarten, in large part because children who
did not attend these programs at age 3 caught up with their classmates
who did. Roughly a quarter of this convergence in academics was attributed
to children’s subsequent classroom experiences.

KEYWORDS: convergence; early childhood education; informal care;

persistence

W ith mounting evidence that high quality early childhood education

(ECE) programs help prepare children for school (Phillips, Lipsey,
et al., 2017; Yoshikawa et al., 2013), public funding for ECE has seen a rapid
increase, with most state programs providing 1 year of public ECE for 4-year-
olds (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018). In many locations, increased access to
public ECE programs has not been limited to 4-year-olds, with programs
enrolling younger children also. As a result, there has been a rise in ECE
enrollment rates among 3-year-olds, such that many children today partici-
pate in ECE for multiple years before entering kindergarten (e.g., Aikens,
Klein, Tarullo, & West, 2013; Jenkins, Farkas, Duncan, Burchinal, &
Vandell, 2016). Indeed, national statistics reveal that between birth and 2
years of age, roughly 16% of children experience ECE, but the percentage
enrolled increases to 35% of 3-year-olds and 60% of 4-year-olds (National
Survey of Early Care and Education Project Team, 2015) and the median
age of ECE entry is 3 years of age (authors’ calculations from the Early
Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11). Given the
widespread utilization of ECE as an educational and developmental resource
for children from low-income communities, there is a growing need to
understand the extent to which earlier exposure to these programs serving
our nation’s youngest and most at-risk children provides them with develop-
mental benefits, and whether detected benefits persist over time.
In the present study, we add to the research base on the encouraging
findings regarding the short-term benefits of contemporary ECE programs
serving 4-year-olds, by examining the benefits of ECE participation for chil-
dren of economic disadvantage who enroll in these programs at the age of 3,
within a large, culturally and linguistically diverse county. It is important to
note that at this age (and in the participating state), the primary programs
serving 3-year-olds are Head Start and other community-based programs
that span across local and national chains (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018).
Moreover, we extend the contributions to the literature by considering the
extent to which there is convergence in the benefits of ECE by the end of
children’s 4-year-old prekindergarten year (from here forth referred to as
the pre-K year), and if so, why convergence occurs and whether it occurs

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as a result of catch-up (i.e., children without prior ECE experience making
ground) or fade-out (i.e., children with prior ECE experience losing ground).
In doing so, this investigation is poised to add to the limited literature that
has considered children’s ECE experiences at age 3 and, thus, can provide
greater insight into the implications of program participation and the condi-
tions under which large, diverse communities construct and implement early
education systems that promote learning and, ultimately, reduce achieve-
ment and opportunity gaps. At the same time, this research may also inform
the debates surrounding the nature of convergence by providing new insight
into the factors that contribute to (or inhibit) the persistence of early benefits.

Short-Term Effects of ECE

Numerous studies have now demonstrated that the effects of contemporary
and large-scale ECE programs on children’s short-term academic development
is quite positive (for reviews, see G. J. Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Phillips,
Lipsey, et al., 2017; Yoshikawa et al., 2013). Children of all backgrounds—and
especially those from low-income and disadvantaged homes—who attended
high-quality early childhood programs at age 4 enter kindergarten more ready
academically, with an average treatment effect of approximately 0.25 standard
deviation units (Bailey, Duncan, Odgers, & Yu, 2017). Despite these promising
findings, there remain far fewer studies of program participation at age 3, which
is concerning because, as noted above, there is now a substantial proportion of
3-year-olds enrolled in ECE, and there is considerable variation in these benefits
as a function of program design, populations and ages served, and the broader
community context (G. J. Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Phillips, Lipsey, et al.,
2017). As has been argued, the consistency and variation in the short-term aca-
demic benefits of contemporary ECE programs serving diverse populations
across different locations require attention and clarification (Phillips, Johnson,
Weiland, & Hutchison, 2017).
In contrast to the short-term academic outcomes of ECE, the findings for
children’s socioemotional development and their executive functioning,
which are recognized as two key skills for lifelong learning (Heckman &
Kautz, 2012; Masten et al., 2012; McClelland, Acock, Piccinin, Rhea, &
Stallings, 2013), remain far more mixed (Phillips, Lipsey, et al., 2017;
Yoshikawa et al., 2013). Indeed, some educational scholars have documented
negative effects of ECE enrollment for children’s behavior (e.g., Ansari, 2018;
Bassok, Gibbs, & Latham, 2018; Magnuson, Ruhm, & Waldfogel, 2007;
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD] Early
Child Care Research Network, 2003), and others have documented positive
or null effects (e.g., Forry, Davis, & Welti, 2013; Puma et al., 2012; Weiland
& Yoshikawa, 2013; Zachrisson, Dearing, Lekhal, & Toppelberg, 2013) for
these dimensions of children’s development.

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Additionally, when considering explanations for variation in the imme-
diate benefits (or drawbacks) of ECE, one point of discussion is children’s
age of entry. For example, in some studies children who enter ECE programs
by 2½ to 3 years of age and who remain in ECE through age 4 display stron-
ger academic skills (but weaker social behavior skills in the short term) as
compared with children entering ECE at a later age or with nonattenders
(Burchinal, Zaslow, & Tarullo, 2016; Loeb, Bridges, Bassok, Fuller, &
Rumberger, 2007; Loeb, Fuller, Kagan, & Carrol, 2004; Puma et al., 2012).
On the other hand, others report that children who have more years of
ECE experience benefit less from these arrangements over time (Jenkins
et al., 2016; Yoshikawa et al., 2013). However, studies of the benefits of attend-
ing pre-K programs at age 4 greatly outnumber evaluations of programs serv-
ing 3-year-olds, which significantly limits our understanding of the effects of
ECE programs given enrollment trends and the fact that more children today
experience multiple years of ECE before entering kindergarten (Aikens et al.,
2013; Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018; Jenkins et al., 2016).

Persistence and Convergence of ECE Effects

A common finding across studies that have had the advantage of follow-
ing preschool-enrolled children for multiple years is that program benefits
diminish (Camilli, Vargas, Ryan & Barnett, 2010; Clements, Sarama, Wolfe,
& Spitler, 2013; Lipsey, Farran, & Durkin, 2018; Puma et al., 2012), a phenom-
enon known as convergence. Indeed, prior studies have found that conver-
gence is most rapid during the year or two after program completion (Ansari,
2018; Li et al., 2016). Contemporary ECE programs, on average, confer
immediate academic benefits of roughly 0.25 standard deviation units; after
12 to 24 months from program completion, these benefits are only 0.10 stan-
dard deviation units (Bailey et al., 2017). Whether contemporary programs
have persisting benefits for children’s social-behavior development and their
executive function skills is unclear. However, studies that have tracked chil-
dren over time report that immediate negative behavioral effects of ECE
enrollment converge fairly rapidly after program completion, such that there
are only small differences in children’s social-behavior as a function of ear-
lier ECE participation (Dearing, Zachrisson & Nærrde, 2015; Pingault et al.,
2015). For example, using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal
Study Kindergarten Cohort of 1998, Ansari (2018) found that preschool grad-
uates entered kindergarten demonstrating elevated levels of behavior prob-
lems, with effect sizes of approximately 0.20 standard deviation units; after
24 months from program completion, these differences were only 0.10 stan-
dard deviation units.
This convergence in the short-term effects of program participation has
been found to occur for one of two reasons (Bailey et al., 2017; Barnett,
2011; Yoshikawa et al., 2013): (a) catch-up or (b) fade-out. When

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considering the academic outcomes of ECE, catch-up results from non–ECE
attendees making ground on their classmates with prior ECE experience,
whereas fade-out occurs when ECE attendees demonstrate slowed progress
over time. In contrast, when unpacking the immediate negative social-
behavioral effects of ECE, catch-up occurs when non–ECE attendees demon-
strate increased social-behavioral difficulties over time, whereas fade-out
would occur when ECE graduates display reductions in problem behavior.
Several hypotheses have been put forth as potential explanations for the
convergence in program impacts: theories of sustaining environments, mod-
els of skill building, and the social group adaptation hypothesis (Bailey et al.,
2017; Pingault et al., 2015). We touch on these arguments below to frame an
analysis of the multiyear benefits of children enrolling in ECE programs as
early as age 3. It is important to note that theories of sustaining environments
and models of skill building are generally concerned with children’s aca-
demic achievement, whereas the social group adaptation hypothesis
addresses children’s social-behavioral development.

Sustaining Environments
Children from different backgrounds enter school with wide-ranging dif-
ferences in personal, experiential, and social psychological factors that affect
their transition to (and subsequent experiences in) school (Entwisle &
Alexander, 1988). One of these experiential differences includes enrollment
in ECE programs even before entering pre-K as a 4-year-old. Presumably, edu-
cational experiences in ECE as a 3-year-old (and earlier ages as well) could
provide a basis for further educational progressions as a 4-year-old or could
serve as a lost opportunity if subsequent educational opportunities fail to build
on prior gains (Claessens, Engel, & Curran, 2014; Magnuson et al., 2007). This
alignment of educational systems (or lack thereof), which is described as ‘‘sus-
taining environments,’’ is of interest because the benefits of ECE persist only if
graduates of these programs continue to learn new skills at the same or a faster
rate as compared with their peers who did not attend ECE at age 3.
Accordingly, misalignment across children’s early educational experiences
can be one of the primary reasons for convergence as described earlier.

Models of Skill Building

A second argument surrounding the convergence of early ECE effects
stems from theories of skill building. Although early investments are thought
to shape children’s long-term development by providing foundational skills
necessary to succeed in school (Cunha, et al., 2006; G. J. Duncan et al.,
2007), Bailey et al. (2017) argue that for long-term benefits to emerge, the
skills children learn in ECE must matter in relation to learning subsequent
skills and not otherwise develop among children not enrolled in these pro-
grams. In support of these very points, mastery of more constrained skills,

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such as letter-word identification and counting, occurs within a short time
span given their fixed endpoints (Paris, 2005). Such constrained skills may
be both responsive to instruction and fundamental for later learning, and
as a result, exposure to early education programming may produce a notice-
able positive effect in the short term. However, convergence, for those skills,
is also probable if children not exposed to ECE acquire such skills shortly
after school entry.

Social Group Adaptation

The final point of consideration underlying convergence—and in partic-
ular, for the diminishing negative behavioral effects of ECE—stems from pro-
cess related to social group adaptation (Pingault et al., 2015). Within this
framework, it is argued that the vast majority of children enter school-based
settings at some point in their life (some earlier and some later) and there-
fore all children must adapt to and integrate into social groups. When chil-
dren enter ECE for the first time, they must adapt to social and school-based
settings, often resulting in heightened behavior problems (e.g., Ansari, 2018;
Bassok et al., 2018; Dearing et al., 2015; NICHD Early Child Care Research
Network, 2003; Pingault et al., 2015). Because this same adaptation process
unfolds for all children, any initial differences that stem from ECE enrollment
are hypothesized to diminish as non–ECE-enrolled children enter school and
adapt to their social settings at a future point in time (Pingault et al., 2015).
Under this frame, any immediate negative social-behavioral effects of ECE
participation may have more to do with children adapting to new social
groups, which is inevitable for all children, rather than with a specific effect
of ECE. However, several studies find lingering—albeit small—persisting
negative associations between ECE enrollment and children’s social-behav-
ioral functioning through the early elementary school years (e.g., Ansari,
2018; Bassok et al., 2018; Belsky et al., 2007).

The Current Study

In light of interest in the benefits of ECE programs and increased num-
bers of children entering ECE at an earlier age, as well as increasing impor-
tance of identifying conditions that sustain program benefits, the current
investigation addresses the following research questions:

Research Question 1: Do children who attended ECE at the age of 3 demonstrate

stronger academic, socioemotional, and executive function skills at the start of
the following school year (i.e., their 4-year-old pre-K year) as compared with
children without prior ECE experience as 3-year-olds?
Research Question 2: To what extent do benefits of ECE participation at age 3 per-
sist through the end of the following school year, and is there evidence for
convergence?

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In addition, if there is empirical evidence of convergence, then the fol-
lowing questions emerge:

Research Question 3: To what extent is convergence attributed to catch-up among

children who did not participate in ECE at age 3 as compared with fade-out
among those who did?
Research Question 4: What share of this convergence is attributed to child-,
family-, and classroom-wide factors?

We hypothesized that children who attended ECE at age 3 would demonstrate

stronger academic skills at school entry in the following year, but we did not
make directional hypotheses about the possible associations between ECE
participation and children’s social-behavioral development or their executive
functioning given the conflicting evidence in the existing literature (Phillips,
Lipsey, et al., 2017). Additionally, given the ambiguities surrounding the per-
sistence of ECE effects outlined above, we left the remainder of our study aims
as largely exploratory. But based on prior theory and other work in the liter-
ature, we (a) expected that if convergence were to occur, then it would be
larger for more constrained skills (e.g., letter-word identification) than uncon-
strained skills (e.g., vocabulary knowledge; Bailey et al., 2017; Paris, 2005),
and (b) if there were any negative social-behavioral effects of ECE, then
they would converge—at least partially—by the end of the pre-K year
(Pingault et al., 2015).

Method
Recruitment and Participants
Data for the current investigation were drawn from a sample of children
from low-income families who lived in a large, culturally and linguistically
diverse county that served roughly 200,000 students from pre-K through
12th grade in the 2016–2017 school year. Within this county, teachers were
recruited in the fall of 2016 from the entire population of school- and commu-
nity-based pre-K programs that served children from low-income families. As
part of the recruitment procedures, all pre-K teachers in public schools were
considered eligible for participation, but in community-based programs,
teachers were eligible only if they taught at a center in which more than
five publicly funded pre-K children were enrolled. Of the 155 preschool
teachers, 138 teachers in 83 schools/centers consented to participate (89% par-
ticipation rate; range of classrooms per school = 1–9; roughly 1.64 classrooms
per school). Participating teachers sent all parents or guardians of their stu-
dents a consent form and a short family demographic questionnaire.
Children were considered eligible to participate in the larger study if they
turned 4 years old by September 30 and were not receiving special education
services (except for speech). On average, 7 out of every 10 parents who

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Ansari et al.
received the recruitment packets at the beginning of the school year in each
classroom consented to allow their children to participate in the study (five
classrooms had low parental consent and ranged from 5% to 22%; the remain-
der ranged from 25% to 100%). Of the 1,500 children with consent, approxi-
mately 71% attended full-day pre-K classrooms within schools, whereas the
remainder attended a Head Start classroom (18%) or full-day community-
based pre-K (11%), which consisted of subsidized slots in private child care
centers.
The analytic sample for the current investigation includes 1,213 children
and families of the original recruitment sample who had valid reports of
age 3 ECE participation (more details provided below). Two-hundred and
eighty-seven children were excluded from our study because their parents
did not return the demographic questionnaire at the beginning of the year
(n = 236) or did not answer the question on the demographic questionnaire
regarding age 3 ECE experiences (n = 51). But for data on child gender, child
race/ethnicity, and home language, which were provided by the school and,
therefore, available for the majority of study participants, we found no signif-
icant differences between our study sample and those children who were
excluded. Children who were included in our sample, nevertheless, were
roughly half a month older (p \ .05), more likely to have attended a Head
Start classroom (19% vs. 14%, p \ .05), and less likely to have attended a com-
munity-based classroom (9% vs. 18%, p \ .001) at the age of 4. On the other
hand, children who were included in our sample were no more or less likely
to have attended a school-based classroom at the age of 4 as compared with
children who were excluded from our analytic sample.
At the aggregate level, the 1,213 children who were included in our final
analytic sample were racially and ethnically diverse (61% Latino, 17% Black,
12% Asian/other, and 10% White), came from households with an income-
to-needs ratio of 0.87 (SD = 0.54), had mothers who were 34 years of age
(SD = 7.20), and had mothers who averaged a little over a high school edu-
cation (M = 12.66, SD = 1.81). There were an equal number of males (50%)
and females (50%), and children were 4.41 years of age (SD = 0.29) at pre-K
entry (or 3.31 year of age at entry into ECE). Eighty percent of study children
spoke a language other than English in the home. For other sample descrip-
tive information stratified by age 3 ECE arrangement, see Table 1.

Measures
Early Childhood Education Enrollment
During the beginning of children’s 4-year-old pre-K year, parents were
asked about their children’s primary (and if applicable, secondary) caregiv-
ing arrangement during the prior school year when children were 3 years of
age. Similar to prior studies (e.g., Crosnoe, Purtell, Davis-Kean, Ansari, &
Benner, 2016), we categorized children as having attended ECE if they

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Table 1
Descriptive Statistics for the Focal Variables
of Interest, Separated by Type of Care at Age 3

Early Significant
Informal Childhood Group
Variable Care Education Difference

Child and family characteristics

Child age at pre-K entry 52.91 (3.47) 52.84 (3.43)
Child male 0.51 0.50
Child race/ethnicity
Latino 0.64 0.47 ***
Black 0.15 0.26 ***
White 0.10 0.12
Other 0.12 0.15
Home language
English 0.17 0.36 ***
Spanish 0.60 0.42 ***
Other 0.24 0.22
Parent years of education 12.54 (1.77) 13.24 (1.90) ***
Parent age, years 34.19 (7.17) 33.97 (7.36)
Income-to-needs ratio 0.85 (0.51) 0.97 (0.64) **
Household size 4.84 (1.56) 4.54 (1.53) *
No. of children \18 years in household 2.52 (1.27) 2.47 (1.17)
Fall of preschool outcomes
Academic achievement
Literacy 90.81 (15.04) 97.33 (13.66) ***
Language 85.71 (13.52) 91.40 (11.56) ***
Math 88.67 (13.26) 93.70 (11.76) ***
Applied problems 90.91 (15.00) 96.11 (13.23) ***
Quantitative concepts 88.71 (12.45) 92.01 (12.65) ***
Socioemotional skills
Conduct problems 1.77 (0.88) 2.02 (1.06) ***
Social competence 3.53 (0.76) 3.48 (0.82)
Executive function 20.02 (0.74) 0.13 (0.84) *
Backward Digit Span 1.16 (0.50) 1.23 (0.56)
Head Toes Knees Shoulders 14.08 (21.69) 18.01 (24.20) *
y
Pencil Tap 0.48 (0.35) 0.53 (0.35)
Spring of preschool outcomes
Academic achievement
Literacy 97.16 (13.62) 98.66 (13.42)
Language 88.41 (11.23) 92.47 (10.66) ***
Math 93.51 (12.41) 95.73 (12.16) *
Applied problems 96.34 (12.52) 99.02 (11.56) **
Quantitative concepts 91.01 (14.17) 92.75 (14.44)

(continued)

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Ansari et al.
Table 1 (continued)

Early Significant
Informal Childhood Group
Variable Care Education Difference

Socioemotional skills
Conduct problems 1.73 (0.87) 1.96 (0.99) **
Social competence 3.76 (0.79) 3.60 (0.82) *
Executive function 0.02 (0.78) 0.03 (0.84)
Backward Digit Span 1.43 (0.77) 1.49 (0.82)
Head Toes Knees Shoulders 31.24 (27.92) 31.81 (28.39)
Pencil Tap 0.72 (0.31) 0.70 (0.32)
Sample size 1,009 204

Note. Estimates generated before multiple imputation and may not sum to 1.00 due to
rounding. Estimates correspond to means or proportions and those in parentheses corre-
spond to standard deviations.
***p \ .001. **p \ .01. *p \ .05. yp \ .10.

had any exposure to ‘‘a child care center or preschool classroom’’ at the age
of 3, which included private child care centers, church-based programs,
school-based programs, and Head Start. Children who were cared for only
by their parents, relatives, babysitters, or family child care providers were
categorized as having attended informal care. Based on this classification
strategy, 204 children were considered to have attended a formal ECE pro-
gram at the age of 3, and the remainder, and majority, had no formal ECE
experience during the year before pre-K (n = 1,009, roughly 75% of
whom were cared for by their parents at home). Of the children who
attended a formal ECE program at age 3, 54% subsequently attended
a school-based program, 16% attended Head Start, and 30% attended a
community-based program at age 4. As a precaution, we also considered
whether the benefits of ECE enrollment at age 3 reported below varied as
a function of the subsequent type of classroom children attended at age 4
and found no differences (results available from authors).

Academic Achievement
Children’s academic achievement was directly assessed during the fall
and spring of the pre-K year with four subtests from the Woodcock-
Johnson III Psychoeducational Battery (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather,
2001). First, the Letter Word Identification subscale was used to measure
children’s literacy skills (a = .94). As part of this assessment, children were
required to identify printed letters and words. Next, the Picture Vocabulary
subtest (a = .81) was used to measure children’s language skills and required

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that children identify objects that were depicted in a series of pictures.
Finally, two subscales of the Woodcock-Johnson III were administered to
measure children’s math skills: Applied Problems (a = .93) and
Quantitative Concepts (a = .91). The Applied Problems subscale required
that children perform basic math calculations in response to orally presented
problems, whereas the Quantitative Concepts battery required children to
identify number patterns. These two subscales were composited to create
an indicator of math achievement (within time rs = .69–.71). For the purpo-
ses of the present study, we used standard scores for these assessments,
which were externally benchmarked and describe children’s academic per-
formance relative to the average performance of their same-age peers. The
test developers benchmarked these test scores such that the average stan-
dard score was 100 with a standard deviation of 15.
It is important to note that children were assessed in English unless they
failed the language screener (PreLAS; S. E. Duncan & De Avila, 1998); if this
was the case, and they spoke Spanish, then they were assessed with
Woodcock-Muñoz (Woodcock & Sandoval, 1996), in the fall of pre-K
(25%) in addition to the English assessments. In the spring, however, all chil-
dren were assessed only in English. For the purposes of the present study,
we used children’s scores from the English version of these assessments dur-
ing the fall of pre-K.

Socioemotional Skills
In the fall (November–December) and spring (April–May) of the pre-K
year, children’s teachers were asked to rate a series of items according to
how well they described the study child. These items were derived from
the Teacher Child Rating Scale (Hightower, 1986) and were based on a 5-
point Likert-type scale (1 = not at all, 3 = moderately well, 5 = very well).
Overall, these survey items from the Teacher Child Rating Scale tap into
two different dimensions of children’s socioemotional skills: social compe-
tence (15 items, a =. .94; e.g., tolerates frustration, a self-starter, accepts
imposed limits) and conduct problems (6 items, a = .89; e.g., disruptive in
class, defiant, and overly aggressive with their peers).

Executive Function
Children’s executive function skills were measured with three direct
assessments in the fall and spring of the pre-K year, namely, the Backward
Digit Span Task (Carlson, 2005), the Head, Toes, Knees, Shoulders Task
(McClelland et al., 2007), and the Pencil Tap Task (Smith-Donald, Raver,
Hayes, & Richardson, 2007). As part of the Backward Digit Span assessment,
a trained data collector read a string of numbers to the child and the child
then had to repeat back the reverse string of numbers. The Head, Toes,
Knees, Shoulders Task battery required children to do the opposite of

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Ansari et al.
what the data collector asked of them (e.g., touch their head when told to
touch their toes). And, finally, as part of the Pencil Tap Task, children
were instructed to tap their pencil once when the assessor tapped twice
(and vice versa). Each of these measures has been extensively used and val-
idated with preschool-aged children (Carlson, 2005; McClelland & Cameron,
2012; McClelland et al., 2013; Smith-Donald, et al., 2007). Because the asso-
ciations between ECE participation and all three subscales were the same,
we standardized children’s scores on each of the assessment batteries and
created an overall composite of executive function (see Willoughby, Blair,
& The Family Life Project Investigators, 2016, for a discussion of conceptual,
pragmatic, and statistical evidence for compositing measures of executive
functioning).

Analytic Strategy
One of the main concerns with studies on ECE (and educational research
more generally) is that children’s enrollment in these programs is not exoge-
nous, which can undermine causal inference as factors that select children into
ECE might also influence their success in school (G. J. Duncan & Magnuson,
2013; G. J. Duncan & NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2003). To
address this issue of selection, all models in this study adjust for factors that
capture children’s own characteristics (age, gender, race/ethnicity), their
parents’ capacity and resources (years of education, home language,
income-to-needs ratio), and other household characteristics (parent age,
household size, number of children in the home). Each of these covariates
was informed by prior studies, including a number of conceptual studies
done on parents’ ECE selection behaviors (e.g., Bassok et al., 2018;
Chaudry, Henly, & Meyers, 2010; Coley, Votruba-Drzal, Collins, & Miller,
2014; Crosnoe et al., 2016; Early & Burchinal, 2001; Gordon, Fujimoto,
Kaestner, Korenman, & Abner, 2013; Magnuson et al., 2007; Winsler et al.,
2008). These variables were either derived from the parent survey at the start
of the pre-K year or reported on by the school or center. All models also (a)
address missing data (mean of 8%, range = 0% to 21%) via the imputation of
50 data sets with chained equations and (b) account for dependence in child
outcomes with robust standard errors clustered at the classroom level.
Additionally, because not all of our outcomes were externally benchmarked
(e.g., socioemotional development and executive functioning), we calculate
and report effect sizes based on the standard deviation of the overall study
sample after imputation (i.e., Bpredictor/SDoutcome).
With the above analytic framework in mind, our first set of analyses
examined the benefits of children’s participation in ECE at the age of 3 for
their academic, socioemotional, and executive functioning in the fall and
spring of their pre-K year. To address this research question, we estimated
six regression models in Stata (StataCorp, 2009) that considered the

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associations between ECE enrollment at age 3 with each of the fall of pre-K
outcomes. These same models were then re-estimated with the spring of
pre-K outcomes substituted in.
Then, as a means of capturing whether there was evidence of conver-
gence in the benefits of ECE across the pre-K year, we created a difference
score (spring of pre-K outcomes 2 fall of pre-K outcomes) that captured the
regression slopes of children’s enrollment in ECE (vs. informal care) for their
early learning and development (for a similar approach, see Ansari, 2018;
Magnuson et al., 2007). To illustrate the meaning of this variable, consider
the following example. If we found a positive and statistically significant
association between ECE enrollment and academic achievement in the fall
of pre-K and a negative and statistically significant association for the differ-
ence score, this would suggest that enrollment in ECE at age 3 is associated
with more optimal academic performance at the start of pre-K, but these
associations diminish by the end of the pre-K year. And because our aca-
demic measures were externally benchmarked, this allowed us to decom-
pose the convergence estimates to gauge the extent to which ECE
attendees lost ground (i.e., fade-out) as compared with non-ECE attendees
who made up ground (i.e., catch-up). To do so, we estimated the marginal
effects based on a model where the difference score was the outcome for
children with and without prior ECE experiences (holding all covariates con-
stant at their mean).
Finally, we took two approaches to explore the underlying reasons for
convergence. The first was to compare a bivariate model that only regressed
the difference scores on ECE enrollment with a model that included the char-
acteristics of children and their families. In doing so, this model illustrates the
degree of convergence that is attributable to our demographic controls.
Second, to determine the extent to which the remaining share of conver-
gence was attributed to classroom-level processes, we added classroom
fixed effects (i.e., dummy variables for all classrooms except one), which
allowed us to hold constant all classroom-wide characteristics (e.g., teachers’
qualifications, dosage and quality of instruction, individualization, classroom
resources and materials, peer characteristics) that were the same for students
in the same classroom.

Results
Beginning and End of Pre-K Year Outcomes
As can be seen in Table 2, after adjusting for child, family, and house-
hold factors, participation in ECE programs at the age of 3 (relative to non-
participation) was associated with stronger language, literacy, and math
achievement upon school entry during the following year (ps \ .01).
Effect sizes (ESs) were as follows: 0.28 for language, 0.26 for literacy, and

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Table 2
Associations Between Early Childhood Education
Enrollment at Age 3 and Children’s Early Learning and
Development During the Fall and Spring of the Pre-K Year

Fall of Pre-K Year Spring of Pre-K Year

Outcome B SE p ES B SE p ES

Academic achievement
Literacy 4.00 1.25 ** 0.26 20.25 1.13 20.02
y
Language 4.06 0.93 *** 0.28 1.56 0.83 0.14
Math 2.61 0.96 ** 0.20 0.50 0.93 0.04
Socioemotional skills
Conduct problems 0.25 0.08 ** 0.27 0.22 0.08 ** 0.24
Social competence 20.07 0.08 20.09 20.18 0.07 * 20.22
Executive function 0.04 0.06 0.05 20.08 0.06 20.10

Note. ES = effect size. Estimates reported in this table for the associations between early
childhood education enrollment at age 3 and children’s early learning and development
are net of the child and family characteristics listed in Table 1. All standard errors are clus-
tered at the classroom level.
***p \ .001. **p \ .01. *p \ .05. yp \ .10.

0.20 for math. Results for executive functioning were not significant, but ECE
attendees did demonstrate elevated levels of teacher-reported conduct prob-
lems at the start of the pre-K year (ES = 0.27, p \ .01). Taken together, these
results indicate that participation in ECE at age 3 was related to more
advanced academic skills at pre-K entry but less positive behavioral
adjustment.
When assessing these students at the end of the pre-K year, we found
that these academic associations did not persist over time (see Table 2).
On the other hand, ECE attendees continued to demonstrate higher levels
of conduct problems (ES = 0.24, p \ .01), and at the end of the pre-K
year, they exhibited less optimal social competence (ES = 20.22, p \ .05)
as compared with children who attended informal care during the year prior.

Significance and Source of Convergence

We followed up these end-of-pre-K models with a series of convergence
analyses, which confirmed that for each of the academic outcomes there was
empirical evidence of convergence (ps \ .001; see Table 3). That is, the asso-
ciations between ECE enrollment at age 3 were significantly smaller by the
end of the following pre-K year. Although the associations with literacy
and math shrank by roughly 80% to 100%, the links between ECE enrollment
and children’s language skills shrank by only 60%. When decomposing these

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Table 3
Convergence in the Benefits of Early Childhood Education
Enrollment at Age 3 Across the Pre-K Year

Covariate Classroom
Bivariate Adjustment Fixed Effects
Outcome B SE p B SE p B SE p

Academic achievement
Literacy 25.19 0.80 *** 24.25 0.81 *** 23.34 0.88 ***
Language 23.17 0.59 *** 22.50 0.61 *** 21.91 0.67 **
Math 22.61 0.64 *** 22.11 0.61 *** 21.58 0.74 *
Socioemotional skills
Conduct problems 0.00 0.06 20.03 0.06 20.02 0.07
Social competence 20.13 0.05 * 20.10 0.05 * 20.03 0.04
y
Executive function 20.15 0.05 ** 20.12 0.05 * 20.12 0.06

Note. The outcomes for the estimates in this table correspond to the difference score (i.e.,
spring 2 fall). All standard errors are clustered at the classroom level.
***p \ .001. **p \ .01. *p \ .05. yp \ .10.

estimates, we find that this convergence largely stemmed from ‘‘catch-up’’

among informal care participants (see Figure 1), whose gains were consid-
erably larger than the 3-year-old enrollees. Although age 3 ECE attendees
also gained in skills significantly from fall to spring of their 4-year-old pre-
K year, their gains were significantly smaller throughout the year. Similar pat-
terns emerged for children’s social competence: According to teachers, all
children demonstrated improvement in social behavior across the school
year; however, these improvements were significantly greater among infor-
mal care participants. And, finally, even though ECE participants did not
demonstrate stronger (or weaker) executive function skills at the beginning
or end of the pre-K year, there was evidence to suggest that the difference
across time was significant (see Table 3). This difference over time was
attributed to the fact that children without prior ECE experiences at age 3
made larger executive function gains throughout the year than ECE
graduates.
Having established that there was empirical evidence of convergence
that largely stemmed from ‘‘catch-up,’’ we next explored the portion of
this convergence that was attributed to children’s individual and family char-
acteristics and classroom characteristics. As can be seen in Table 3, roughly
20% of the catch-up effect in academic outcomes was attributed to the child
and family covariates (i.e., column 2 vs. column 1) and approximately 25%
was attributed to classroom-wide factors (i.e., column 3 vs. column 2). The
inclusion of both the child and family demographic controls and classroom
fixed effects accounted for approximately 40% of the total ‘‘catch-up’’

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Figure 1. Model estimated differences in children’s academic skill gains across

the pre-K year for children who attended informal care at age 3 versus children
who attended an early childhood program at age 3.
Note. The difference in estimates from this figure correspond to the estimates reported in
Table 3 under covariate adjustment.
***p \ .001. **p \ .01.

documented in this study (i.e., column 3 vs. column 1). Moreover, approx-
imately 20% of the reversal in children’s executive functioning was attributed
to our child and family demographic covariates, but none of the reversal was
explained by the classroom-wide factors. However, it is important to note
that in using measurable covariates of child and family demographics there
is an imbalance between how much variation we can capture at the family
versus classroom level.
Finally, because existing studies have found that children’s social behav-
ior is predictive of their future academic achievement (e.g., Arnold,
Kupersmidt, Voegler-Lee, & Marshall, 2012; Hartman, Winsler, & Manfra,
2017) and we found that ECE attendees entered the pre-K year demonstrat-
ing elevated levels of behavior problems, we also considered the extent to
which these negative social-behavioral effects might account for some of
the aforementioned convergence in children’s academic achievement.
Results from this exploratory analysis revealed that approximately 10% of
the remaining convergence (net of demographics and classroom-wide fac-
tors) was attributed to the age 3 ECE enrollees less optimal social-behavior

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at pre-K entry. Overall, the inclusion of children’s social behavior in addition
to the demographic controls and classroom fixed effects accounted for
roughly half of the total documented convergence.

Robustness Check
Given the nonexperimental design of the present study, there are threats
to inference regarding the associations between ECE enrollment at age 3 and
children’s early learning, even with our demographic controls. To address
the possibilities of both measured and unmeasured confounds, we took sev-
eral additional precautions to ensure that our findings are robust.

Propensity Score Matching

First, we employed propensity score matching methods, which are rec-
ognized as one of the strongest means of addressing issues of selection on
observables (Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1983). Although propensity scores do
not change the causal identification strategy, propensity scores consider
whether there is overlap in the unmatched sample and the functional form
assumptions are driving our findings. For these reasons, we matched chil-
dren who were in an informal care arrangement at the age of 3 with those
who attended ECE. We used the nearest neighbor method (with up to
four matches) with a caliper of 0.05, ensuring a sufficient overlap between
the two groups on their propensity scores. With these specifications, we
matched roughly 98% to 99% of children who experienced ECE at age 3
with 44% to 51% of children in informal care (sample sizes vary across the
50 imputed data sets). To ensure that these propensity scores were success-
ful, we assessed the quality of the matches by (a) examining whether there
were significant differences between groups after matching and (b) checking
the standardized mean difference between the groups to ensure that they
were less than 10% of a standard deviation, a benchmark used to indicate
negligible differences (Austin, 2011). Before matching, roughly 50% of the
indicators were significantly different across groups, but after matching,
there were no longer any significant differences (see Appendix Table 1 in
the online version of the journal). Likewise, after matching, none of the dif-
ferences across conditions exceeded 10% of a standard deviation, suggesting
that balance was achieved. Having successfully achieved balance, we repli-
cated all models from Table 2 within the matched samples, and these models
confirmed our general conclusions discussed above (see Appendix Table 2
in the online version of the journal). In fact, the average difference in the
reported effect sizes between our OLS specification and the propensity
scores models was less than 0.01, and there continued to be evidence of con-
vergence across the pre-K year (see Appendix Table 3 in the online version
of the journal).

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Ansari et al.
Classroom Fixed Effects
In our primary models discussed above, we estimated classroom fixed
effects to explore the underlying reasons for convergence. But similar fixed
effects models can also be estimated when examining the benefits of child-
ren’s participation in ECE at the age of 3 for their early learning outcomes in
the fall and spring of their pre-K year. In doing so, the variance occurs within
(rather than between) classrooms and, thus, this analytic strategy addresses
potential issues of selection on both observed and unobserved variables.
Results from these classroom fixed effects models were also similar to our
ordinary least squares models outlined above (see Appendix Table 2 in
the online version of the journal). In this instance, the average difference
in our reported effect sizes between our ordinary least squares specification
and the classroom fixed effects models was roughly 0.04, which lends con-
fidence to our general conclusions.

Impact Threshold for Confounding Variables

Finally, we assessed the potential confounding role of unmeasured con-
founds through impact threshold for confounding variables analyses (ITCV;
Frank, 2000) for all significant associations between ECE enrollment and
children’s outcome scores during the fall and spring of pre-K. In short,
ITCV measures the degree to which an unknown variable would have to
be correlated with both the predictor and outcome variables to negate the
observed associations. The equation takes the following form:
# #
rxy  rxy = 1  rxy ;

where rxy#
5t= SQRT½ðn  q  1Þ 1t 2 . In this equation, t is the critical t-value,
n is the sample size, and q is the number of model parameters. When cova-
riates are included in our models, the equation becomes:
h i
2 2
ITCVno covariates 3 SQRTð1  Rxg Þð1  Ryg Þ ;

2
where g is the set of covariates, Rxg is the R2 value from a regression predict-
ing the focal independent variable by the covariates, and Ryg 2
is the R2 value
from a regression predicting the outcome by the covariates. Higher ITCV val-
ues would suggest that some omitted third variable would have to be
strongly correlated with both the focal predictor and outcome to negate
the observed associations and, therefore, increase confidence in our general
conclusions.
As can be seen in Appendix Table 4 (in the online version of the jour-
nal), results from these analyses revealed that an unknown confound would,
conditional on the other covariates in our models, negate our findings
reported in Table 2 only if the unmeasured variable correlated with both
the predictor and our academic outcomes at roughly 0.20 (range 0.15–

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0.27). Similarly, an unknown confound would wash out our socioemotional
findings reported in Table 2 only if the unmeasured variable correlated with
both the predictor and the outcomes at roughly 0.15 (range 0.13–0.19). To
put things in perspective, the only covariate that approached these thresholds
was parent education, which correlated with ECE enrollment at 0.12 and with
our academic outcomes at 0.19 (range = 0.18–0.20). None of the other cova-
riates, conditional on maternal education, approached these thresholds, sug-
gesting that our findings are likely robust to unmeasured variables.
We ran similar ITCV analyses for our convergence analyses from the
covariate-adjusted models reported in Table 3 and found that these results
were even more robust: The average correlation required to negate the
observed convergence in academic achievement was 0.26 (range 0.21–
0.32; see Appendix Table 4 in the online version of the journal). On the other
hand, the differential improvement in children’s social competence across
the pre-K year as a function of ECE enrollment was more susceptible to omit-
ted variables and required only an average correlation of 0.05 with both the
predictor and outcome to negate the observed associations across time.

Discussion
With the growing investments in ECE programs for 3- and 4-year-old
children in the United States (G. J. Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Phillips,
Lipsey, et al., 2017; Yoshikawa et al., 2013), there has been increasing
research and policy interest in understanding the extent of program benefits
and whether these effects persist over time. The purpose of the current
investigation was to add to this growing literature by (a) examining the ben-
efits of ECE participation for children from low-income families who enroll
in these programs at the age of 3 in a large, culturally, and linguistically
diverse county, which reflects many of the demographic trends of the future,
and (b) analyzing the nature and source of convergence, which is a topic
that remains far less well understood. A number of relevant findings
emerged from this effort, which we discuss in more detail below.
To begin, the present investigation contributes to the relatively small
number of studies that have looked specifically at enrollment in ECE during
the third year of life and how that enrollment correlates with children’s early
learning and development throughout the 4-year-old pre-K year. What our
results reveal is that children who attended Head Start and other community-
and school-based programs at the age of 3 (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018)
entered pre-K the following year demonstrating stronger language, literacy,
and math skills. These effect sizes ranged from approximately 0.20 to 0.30,
which is on par with the few other existing evaluations of ECE programs
serving 3-year-olds (e.g., 0.15–0.35; Puma et al., 2012) and meta-analytic
averages reported by Bailey et al. (2017) regarding ECE programs more
broadly. In fact, the ethnically diverse children in our study sample who

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Ansari et al.
came from low-income homes and experienced ECE at age 3 entered the
pre-K year demonstrating academic skills that were not too far off from
national averages. In this regard, there is reason for optimism.
Even though the above results are consistent with both experimental
and quasi-experimental findings in the existing literature, the other pattern
of results reported in this investigation are potentially more concerning.
More specifically, the estimated associations between ECE enrollment as 3-
year-olds and children’s executive functioning at school entry during the fol-
lowing pre-K year were close to zero, and children with earlier ECE experi-
ences demonstrated elevated levels of behavior problems at the beginning
and end of their 4-year-old pre-K year and demonstrated less optimal social
competence by the end of the year. It is of course possible that parents place
more behaviorally challenging children in ECE at younger ages, which we
unfortunately could not consider. However, two recent studies found that
net of the covariates included in our models, there was little evidence of
such child effects: Worse behaved children (or higher functioning children)
were not more likely to experience ECE (Coley et al., 2014; Crosnoe et al.,
2016). Thus, the negative behavioral outcomes of ECE that have been docu-
mented elsewhere with children from middle-class families (Ansari, 2018;
Bassok et al., 2018; Belsky et al., 2007; Magnuson et al., 2007; NICHD
Early Child Care Research Network, 2003) are also apparent, in this study,
for children from low-income homes.
There is likely no single explanation for these negative social-behavioral
patterns. Indeed, some education scholars have argued that these associa-
tions may result from disruptions in parent-child relationships or by way
of exposure to new high-stress contexts and peers (Huston, Bobbitt, &
Bentley, 2015). But if this were the sole explanation, then our findings run
counter to the social group adaptation hypothesis (Pingault et al., 2015),
which contends that the negative behavioral effects of ECE are likely to rap-
idly converge because children who experience informal care must adapt to
social group settings after the transition to school, which ECE attendees have
already experienced beforehand. There is of course still a long window for
these negative behavioral associations to converge throughout children’s
educational careers, but one would presume that this adaptation process
would occur immediately after the counterfactual condition enters school
(Dearing et al., 2015; Pingault et al., 2015). Given these conflicting findings,
future studies in this area should more carefully consider why these negative
associations emerge, as they are likely to have downstream consequences.
Notably, similar to (Ansari, 2018), we also found that roughly 10% of the con-
vergence in academic achievement was attributed to the fact that graduates
of ECE entered the pre-K year with less optimal social behavior, indicating
these behavioral shortcomings may have interfered with classroom adjust-
ment in ways that resulted in fewer gains in areas of math, language, and lit-
eracy throughout the school year.

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Our results also support some of the arguments put forth by Bailey et al.
(2017), who suggest that targeting malleable skills that would develop
absent of intervention is insufficient for generating long-term impacts, in
part because many of these skills are likely to develop rapidly among chil-
dren in the counterfactual condition. Put another way, although children
with an ECE experience at age 3 entered the pre-K year with early academic
‘‘advantages,’’ these advantages might disappear when children not exposed
to ECE at age 3 are exposed to instruction in pre-K that is better aligned to
lower level skills. In terms of basic counting skills and letter-word identifica-
tion, which represent some of the skills that all children might be expected
to develop before the transition to kindergarten (Paris, 2005), we docu-
mented 80% to 100% convergence by the end of the pre-K year. Children
with earlier ECE experiences entered the pre-K year with a modest advan-
tage in these domains, but these advantages shrunk between the two groups
because those in the comparison condition made large strides during the
pre-K year and, as a result, caught up with their more advanced classmates.
In contrast, for higher order skills, such as children’s vocabulary knowledge,
which is more open to ongoing development and improvement (Paris,
2005), convergence appeared less steep (roughly 60%). To put these esti-
mates in context, consider the work of Bailey et al. (2017) who found that
the cognitive impacts of ECE decreased by roughly 60% in the year after pro-
gram completion. Likewise, results from the Head Start Impact Study sug-
gested that for academic outcomes, program impacts for 3-year-olds
diminished by approximately 75% through the following school year
(Puma et al., 2012). Thus, the estimates of convergence reported herein
are not too dissimilar from those reported in the extant literature.
In light of the above patterns of convergence, what our results make
clear is that we must carefully think about the distinction between skills
that would and would not develop in the early elementary years (or in
pre-K) in the absence of ECE (Bailey et al., 2017), which has important impli-
cations for the ways in which we structure children’s early school experien-
ces. For example, when children are exposed to academic activities in ECE
programs, it is most often targeted at basic literacy skills (Chien et al., 2010;
Pianta, Whittaker, Vitiello, Ansari, & Ruzek, 2018), and therefore, children
have fewer opportunities to develop other, more unconstrained abilities,
such as language skills, which represent skills that many preschool programs
actually fail to affect (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). For these reasons,
the pattern of findings reported herein provide some suggestive evidence
that ECE programs may need to increase attention to unconstrained skills.
At the same time, however, it is also possible that the documented associa-
tions—regardless of the learning domain—were simply not large enough to
persist over time. Accordingly, in addition to paying careful attention to the
development of unconstrained skills, to optimize the immediate benefits of
ECE, there is likely a need to enrich these programs by providing supports

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Ansari et al.
for learning and teaching, including with validated curriculum and profes-
sional development.
Beyond the malleability and development of skills, our results also con-
tribute to the extant literature by highlighting the role of children’s subsequent
experiences in the classroom that help preserve (or erase) some of the early
academic advantages of ECE seen at the start of school. It seems somewhat
promising that a quarter of the convergence documented in this study was
attributed to classroom-wide factors during the pre-K year, suggesting that
convergence is—at least partially—addressable at the classroom level. These
findings are, thus, both similar to research suggesting that children’s subse-
quent classroom and school experiences matter for the maintenance of the
early ECE boost (Ansari & Pianta, 2018; Currie & Thomas, 2000; Johnson &
Jackson, 2017; Swain, Springer, & Hofer, 2015; Zhai, Raver, & Jones, 2012)
and different from existing work suggesting that classroom processes account
for little to no amount of convergence (Bassok et al., 2018; Claessens et al.,
2014; Jenkins et al., 2018).
One likely explanation for these differences is the way in which we
addressed this question. In the current study, we used classroom fixed
effects, which accounted for all classroom-wide factors that contribute to
convergence, whereas the vast majority of the existing literature has tested
individual classroom factors. And even though the specific mechanisms
driving these findings at the classroom level may be unclear and beyond
the scope of our study, our findings do indicate that the subsequent class-
room experiences matter. Thus, what our results make clear is that as the
next-wave pre-K and ECE evaluations unfold, the research community needs
to pay much closer attention to the specific aspects of the classroom that
contribute to (or prevent) convergence. Areas that require attention include
(but are not limited to) the alignment of instructional content across school
years, teachers’ use of differentiation, teachers’ grouping strategies, class-
room quality, the role of children’s peers, and children’s individual experien-
ces in the classroom (Ansari & Purtell, 2018; Phillips, Johnson, et al., 2017;
Phillips, Lipsey, et al., 2017). This effort is especially important given the
growing number of 3-year-olds who experience a year of ECE before their
pre-K year (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018). To the extent that these experien-
ces are not aligned, then the impacts of ECE and pre-K will not be optimized.
Finally, even though our models explained roughly half of the conver-
gence documented in the associations between ECE enrollment and child-
ren’s early academic achievement, the other half remains unexplained.
Consequently, one might wonder what other factors may contribute to these
findings. As noted above, by using measurable covariates to tap into the con-
vergence attributed to child and family characteristics and classroom fixed
effects to tap into convergence attributed to classroom-wide factors, there
is an imbalance between how much variation we can capture at these two
levels. Whereas our classroom fixed effects capture all differences across

1516
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classrooms, we could not account for all differences between children.
Accordingly, there are other child- and family-level factors that are likely to
contribute to the convergence documented in this study. For example, one
important source of convergence that we could not consider includes parental
efforts in the home to prepare children for school. To the extent that parents
of non-ECE participants place greater effort in the home to prepare children
for school, especially in terms of teaching their children more constrained
skills such as counting and letter knowledge, then that is likely to account
for some of the unexplained convergence. For these reasons, studies with
more in-depth data on children and families are needed to more carefully con-
sider the role of children’s home experiences and the interplay between the
home and school in the dissipating academic benefits of ECE.
Taken together, the results from this investigation provide important insight
into the potential benefits of ECE enrollment at age 3 for children from low-
income homes, but they need to be interpreted in light of a few key limitations.
Primarily, the current sample distribution of ECE attenders and nonattenders
provided us 0.80 power to detect a 0.22 effect size of ECE enrollment on the
child outcomes of interest, but we were limited in that we did not have enough
statistical power to examine heterogeneity in these associations. Consequently,
we could conclude that roughly a quarter of the convergence in the links
between ECE and children’s academic learning was attributed to classroom-
wide factors, but we could not test for moderation by specific aspects of the
classroom, which would have provided us with more specific information
about malleable classroom factors that could be targets for intervention.
Moreover, consistent with other studies in the early childhood literature
(e.g., Bassok et al., 2018; Curenton, Dong, & Shen, 2015; Magnuson et al.,
2007), all of the covariates used in our models (including our propensity
score models) were assessed after ECE attendance. Some of these variables
were time invariant, but even so, the best implementation of these longitu-
dinal models is with the use of pretreatment covariates. In addition, the
design of our study was nonexperimental, and even though our findings
were comparable across various analytic specifications and we were able
to gauge the role of unmeasured variables—all of which lend greater confi-
dence to our general conclusions—these results should be interpreted with
caution. For example, without having assessment of outcomes at the begin-
ning and end of the age 3 year, we cannot know for certain if the trends
observed are continuations of trends during the age 3 year or if children
lost ground between the end of the age 3 year and the start of pre-K.
Thus, it is possible that our estimates of the benefits of ECE at age 3 are
over- or underestimated. But it is important to note that that our effect sizes
are on par with the existing literature and that the pattern of convergence
reported herein has been demonstrated in both experimental and nonexper-
imental studies (e.g., Ansari, 2018; Bailey et al., 2017; Bassok et al., 2018;
Lipsey et al., 2018; Puma et al., 2012). The main difference between our

1517
Ansari et al.
investigation and these other studies is that we demonstrate these patterns of
convergence for a younger group of children.
It was also unfortunate that we could not determine what type of ECE
programs children attended at age 3, which were based on parent report
and not verified to ensure that children did in fact attend these programs
nor could we determine whether children attended the same school or center
at ages 3 and 4. And given our study design, we do not know whether pre-K
teachers knew what type of program children attended at age 3. But these lim-
itations are true for most studies of pre-K and ECE more generally (e.g.,
Bassok et al., 2018; Crosnoe, 2007; Loeb et al., 2007; Magnuson et al.,
2007). In addition, even though we measured a representative sample of
children’s skills, our assessment batteries by no means cover all potential mal-
leable skills that might be affected by school exposure. Finally, our results are
also not generalizable to ECE programs beyond the participating county;
nonetheless, because our study provides further insight into the experiences
of children in a large, culturally and linguistically diverse community, this lim-
itation is somewhat mitigated. As states move forward with the expansion of
ECE for younger children, attempts at replication across different communities
are of growing importance. However, even with the potential limitations of
focusing on one community, our analyses have greater external validity as
our approach to assessing the source and nature of convergence can be
widely applied when studying the persistence of ECE effects. Indeed,
although many long-term pre-K and ECE evaluations do not have observable
data on children’s subsequent classroom and school experiences, fixed effects
can be implemented to understand the source of convergence, which to our
knowledge has rarely been done in the extant literature.
With these limitations and future directions in mind, the present study
provides new insight into the efficacy of contemporary ECE programs serv-
ing 3-year-olds from low-income and ethnic homes. Our findings add to the
existing knowledge base by revealing that these children from low-income
homes display heightened behavior problems as a result of ECE participation
and that these negative ‘‘effects’’ persist at least for 12 months from program
completion and have downstream implications for convergence. Our results
also provide further evidence that children who attended ECE at age 3
entered the pre-K year more ready academically, but these advantages
were short-lived. When taken together, these findings corroborate some of
the evidence from Tennessee (Lipsey et al., 2018) and the national evalua-
tion of Head Start (Puma et al., 2012), in addition to mathematics interven-
tions for preschool-aged children (Clements et al., 2013), each of which
also documented only short-term academic benefits of program participa-
tion. At the same time, however, having explored the source and nature of
convergence, the present study pushes this discussion forward by revealing
that (a) convergence in the academic benefits of ECE was largely attributed
to catch-up (not fade-out) and (b) approximately a quarter of this

1518
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convergence was attributed to classroom-wide factors during the following
year. Accordingly, convergence—at least in the short term—can be partially
mitigated, and teachers and classrooms play an important role in this effort.

ORCID iD
Arya Ansari https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5033-9668

Notes
Supplemental material is available for this article in the online version of the journal.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of our many partners: school district leaders,
community programs, teachers, parents, and children. Their enthusiastic cooperation and
participation made much of this work possible. We also extend appreciation and recogni-
tion to Marcia Kraft-Sayer, Marianna Lyulchenko, Laura Helferstay, and Brittany Kerr, who
each made valuable contributions to the project. The research reported here was sup-
ported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through
Grant No. R305N160021 to the University of Virginia. The opinions expressed are those
of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute of Education Sciences or the
U.S. Department of Education.

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Manuscript received June 7, 2018

Final revision received November 12, 2018
Accepted November 13, 2018

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